Just saw an ad on TV by the Education Union criticising the Howard's government funding of schools. The ad says that government schools teach 70% of all Australian students (sounds plausible) but only receive 35% of the funding. Now this seems slightly out of whack and I was suspicious. So lets look at where they get those figures from.
The ad doesn't say what they base that figure on, so we have to guess. I went to this site and looked at the budget figures. The breakdown is as such:
Higher education funding : $8.3 billion
Australian government school funding: $9.7 billion
Indigenous education funding: $0.214 billion
Training (apprentices etc); $3.5 billion
Science and Innovation: $6.5 billion
Total: $28.2 billion
Australian government funding as a percentage of the total: 34.39%
So this appears to be how the ad come up with it's figure. Now this is a bit misleading, the ad implies that we need to give schools more than 35% of the funding since they teach most students. But they don't count University students, apprentices, science researchers etc. And it's not as if Labor is going to turn around and give 100% of the funds to schools at the cost of our unis and apprentices.
Now should schools get more funding? Yes of course, education is important but not at the cost of higher education. The ad should have said that the monetary figure should be increased and not the percentage. Ironic that the teachers union couldn't see the difference between percentages and numbers, or maybe that was the point.
Comments
I've done a fair amount of research on the Education Union website. Throughout this site they use the line 'Schools teach 70% of our students but only receive 35% of the funding'. But they never say how they come to this figure. But I think I've worked it out: (from this site)
(2003 figures, as that's what they seem to be using)
Federal spending on Public Schools - $2.2billion
Federal spending on Private Schools - $4.3billion
State spending on Public Schools - $16.5billion
State spending on Private Schools - $1.8billion
So total Federal government spending on schools is $6.5billion. Of which the state schools make up roughly 35%. Now this is of Federal government spending. If you take the total education spending across federal and state ($24.8) then public schools actually get 75% of the funding to teach only 70% of the students.
And more importantly the federal government is not supposed to be involved in funding education. The majority of the federal education budget goes to capital works (like new classrooms) improving the quality of teachers and funding for remote non-government schools (places where normal government schools have failed to deliver educational services)
This is all 2003 figures, so I'm going to delve into the 2007 budget and see what turns up!